The Museum of London site (now closed as they prepare to move to their new site, coincidentally near the AWS HQ), and there was a window you could look down on part of the wall, which you can also see from the other side of the road near Barbican. I won't give directions, as that seems futile anywhere near Barbican, but I had only just thought about how weird it is that there is wall at Tower Hill, and wall at Barbican - they can't be the same run of wall as it was built, can they? That'd be immense...
Not bad engineering to make it through a handful of civil wars, a Blitz, and a couple thousand V-1 rockets mostly intact. You have to wonder how long all the steel and concrete that's been laid around the Thames from our civilization will last.
Tons of cities have hidden underground streets that are the old street level and now abandoned due to all manner of modernization.
Walking around Chicago I often see houses where the front door is a couple of meters below street level because the house never moved its door to an upper story when the city was releveled.
For more of this sort of thing, check out the Old Structures Engineering blog. Don does a post a day, day in, day out -- so obviously some are more detailed than others. I enjoy having it in my feed.
For another interesting mix of new and ancient, check out the Serdica metro station in Sofia, Bulgaria. [0] It's fully inside an excavated Roman-era ruin. Very cool!
I worked for Lloyd’s Register for a spell, and their cafeteria was where the Vine Street building is, just got used to eating lunch there by the bits of wall everyday for a few years.
If you're in the vicinity of the road called London Wall (where the car park referenced in the article is) then it's only a short walk to London's Roman amphitheatre [1]. It doesn't seem to be very well known but is quite impressive. It's one of very many bits of Roman history entombed in basements of London buildings.
The Merrill Lynch Financial Centre also has a big chunk of Roman stuff in the basement - but there's no public access and no access to the walkway around the ruins even if you're an employee.
Not London Wall related but the London Bloomberg HQ when it was built reconstructed the Temple of Mithras at the actual position, quite deep underground.
One more strange place: the barbershop in Leadenhall Market.
You can see the wall right in the barbershop.
In fact, this wall drove their rent higher and eventually they closed.
(Forgive the sob story, but the barber was amazing, and they closed down + fired everyone with no notice to customers. I have not been able to track him down since!)
Looks like 2007 shows a 404, so maybe there are a few tiny gaps. Still, over 23 years of constant blogging is pretty awesome indeed. It’s in stark contrast to blogspot pages I’ve found that stopped in 2011
I found that I generally ran out of things to talk about after a couple of years. I have more hobbies now so perhaps I could go a lot longer, but talking about those would make a feed nobody wants to follow.
On the subject of walls... Cortez reported seeing a wall blocking off an entire valley on his way to Tenochtitlan. One source reported the wall was 6 miles long, and yet it seems to have disappeared without a trace. And yet, Both the London Wall and Hadrian's Wall, though much older still have surviving ruins to this day.
Cut stone is worth stealing to make new buildings.
In 1491 the point is made that the Inca believed that they had been beaten by superior gods and so they bowed out. But he doesn’t really talk about what happened to the Aztecs. You steal stone from structures you don’t care about anymore.
Didn’t Mexico see more intensive colonization? Settlers would care less about existing structures. Maybe the Spaniards built missions out of the wall.
In Exeter[1], we still have roughly 70% of our Roman wall[2], and there is even a pedestrian footbridge over a road where part of the "bridge" involves walking along the top of the wall's remains.
Unfortunately it didn't mention the section in that carpark! But I can attest that the section behind the Leonardo Royal Hotel is amazing. I also recommend the tower remains on the Barbican estate (and really, just wander around the Barbican for a while, it's a wild place in general).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 48.2 ms ] threadWhat?! That's huge. What happened?
Walking around Chicago I often see houses where the front door is a couple of meters below street level because the house never moved its door to an upper story when the city was releveled.
Recent examples:
https://oldstructures.com/2025/10/24/not-quite-a-tunnel/ https://oldstructures.com/2025/10/21/relieved/
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdika_Metro_Station
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London
Title should probably read "the City of London" rather than "London".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc
The Merrill Lynch Financial Centre also has a big chunk of Roman stuff in the basement - but there's no public access and no access to the walkway around the ruins even if you're an employee.
[1] https://www.thecityofldn.com/directory/londons-roman-amphith...
Edit: or Asia and Russia and South America...
In fact, this wall drove their rent higher and eventually they closed.
(Forgive the sob story, but the barber was amazing, and they closed down + fired everyone with no notice to customers. I have not been able to track him down since!)
I think I have a blog/digital journal from around 2007 or so, but with HUGE gaps (years) where I lost interest.
Pretty incredible in its own right
In 1491 the point is made that the Inca believed that they had been beaten by superior gods and so they bowed out. But he doesn’t really talk about what happened to the Aztecs. You steal stone from structures you don’t care about anymore.
Didn’t Mexico see more intensive colonization? Settlers would care less about existing structures. Maybe the Spaniards built missions out of the wall.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isca_Dumnoniorum [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exeter_city_walls
Otherwise not a very good WeWork.
Unfortunately it didn't mention the section in that carpark! But I can attest that the section behind the Leonardo Royal Hotel is amazing. I also recommend the tower remains on the Barbican estate (and really, just wander around the Barbican for a while, it's a wild place in general).